This story is backed up by what is purported to be a screencap of a cached version of the site, here.

There are a ton of good punchlines to be mined in the comments of the various articles ("What a labia of love for the designer", "Jam out with your clam out", etc.), but either the rest of the Internet is duped, or I am, cuz I don't buy it. The retailer didn't change it at all; someone else did, and made the screencap, and is having a laugh as this goes viral.

For example, the screencap carries a date of April 1. I can't find any previous versions of this website cached at the internet archive.

And of course there's the obvious question of why a retailer would photoshop out such an obvious design feature of a product when advertising it? Like the customer isn't going to notice that she's displaying a little satin Georgia O'Keefe action once she puts it on?

I call shenanigans. I'm probably wrong, but the story is hilarious either way.

That's it exactly; I can easily imagine that -- and so can you, and so can each of the twenty-some people to whom I've showed this photo today, absent context.

Which makes me very skeptical that if the pictured dress is the one actually being sold, none of the designers, buyers, photographers, web designers, or any of the several dozen personnel who were collectively responsible for putting this dress online, absolutely failed to notice the same thing.

Having been through way too many product development meetings, I can assure you that it is quite possible that nobody thought of that before the flamage began. From the name of the dress, I'd guess the decoration was supposed to be a heart, and once that seed was planted on the dev end, it'd be hard to shake loose.